I visit my friend, Carl.

I usually do not get time to go out and visit friends. The stresses and strains of the hectic lifestyle of a middle, upper, lower manager means I do not get much time to myself. I spend my life always on the go, constantly being pulled from meeting to meeting at work, rushing around solving every minor crisis, I'm expected to reply to emails with 30 seconds of getting them and I spend hours agonising over the content of an amuzing story that about a dozen people will read.

But I manage to make time for him today; he has a birthday present for me.

I enter the house. There are two things about his house which I always forget. Firstly, I have to take my shoes off before I enter the house and secondly, their house is so very, very cold. I bend down and untie my shoelaces.

"Well Bell just needs to keep up this sort of form, they say class is permanent..."

I take my right shoe off revealing a hole the size of Wales in my right sock. There is dead silence. Carl notices the hole. The silence is long enough for him to know that I know that he knows that I have a hole in my sock. I am tempted to remove my socks and go native or ask them if they have a needle and thread. Instead I make a temporary repair by pulling some spare sock from behind the toe and tucking the hole between my big toe and the piggy that stayed at home.

I stand.

"and form is temporary." Carl continues.

As well as wearing socks with holes in them, I also seem to have picked the thinnest pair I have in my drawer. I must have had a very bad sock-choosing-day today. After two minutes the frost-bite kicks in and my toes begin to turn a blue colour followed by purple and then finally black.

Carl's her-indoors has just started work at a large American bookstore, where she gets a very competitive discount, I act suitably surprised when I am handed a book shaped present.